Why ‘Harlots’ Season 2 Killed This Beloved Character

Harlots is back on Hulu, and things aren’t going better for our favorite courtesans, bawds, and ladies of the night in Season 2. Lord Fallon (Ben Lambert) and his goons are still on the prowl, and a new magistrate intends to bring a stop to all the prostitution in the neighborhood. However, worse than all of that is the fact that one of the shows most beloved characters was killed in the Harlots Season 2 premiere.

**Harlots Season 2 Spoilers Ahead**

Towards the end of Harlots Season 2, Lord Fallon arrives at the Wells House to see Lucy Wells (Eloise Smyth). Since she and Margaret are out, Kitty Carter (Lottie Tolhurst) opens the door. Lord Fallon entices Kitty to come into his carriage with him with flattery and the promise of payment. Those of us who remember Lord Fallon’s dark predilections from Season 1 probably knew where this was going.

Lord Fallon killed Kitty for fun and dropped her corpse off at the Wells House to scare Margaret and her pals off their scent.

The death wasn’t so much shocking as it was deeply upsetting. We’ve known Kitty Carter since the opening moments of Harlots, and she’s one of the few characters with sense and optimism. Her kindness lifts the other girls up and she’s willing to even dream of a better life for her and Fanny (and Fanny’s baby).

So why choose Kitty to kill off? Harlots showrunner and co-creator Moria Buffini told Decider that Kitty had to die “because we love her.”

“It was a really hard thing to do. The first draft of the episode I wrote didn’t have that ending,” Buffini said. “Given everything that had happened in the series before and given where we left everybody — it just felt like it didn’t have high enough stakes.”

“It was a really difficult thing to do because we did all love her. We don’t do it lightly. It had to matter,” Buffini stressed.

Kitty’s death sets off a chain reaction of events that threaten Margaret’s crusade for justice, and leave poor Nancy whipped by the law (see above).

That said, Kitty’s death also stresses one of the central conflicts in Harlots: between the men who have all the power, and the women struggling to survive in spite of that set up.

“Fallon is just one of a number of men…who think that they can do what they like to women. It’s such a timeless story: Men with all the power and women with none,” Buffini said. “And what do you do? How can you be powerful when you have no power?”

Buffini went on to describe the situation as “gender apartheid, which the 18th century was.”

Still, Buffini said that Harlots isn’t a show about the way things used to be for women, but about how they still are today.

“In the same way The Handmaid’s Tale takes it on futuristically, in Harlots I think we look at gender relations through the prism of the past. But the show for us, it’s got to be entirely about now. We care about gender relations and women’s stories now. We’ve just chosen to tell them then,” she said.

Lord Fallon’s relationship with Lucy Wells will evolve in surprising ways over Harlots Season 2. Stay tuned for more on that in the weeks to come…

Stream Harlots on Hulu